Trump DECLARES that Neocon Mark Levin Is Above All Criticism
Glenn Greenwald critiques President Trump for betraying his 2024 promises to purge neoconservatives by elevating Mark Levin despite Levin's antisemitic history and calls for war in Iran. While Trump expelled critics like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, he simultaneously engaged far-right activist Laura Loomer during the conflict, redefining MAGA as a cult of personality centered on unconditional support for Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu. This shift effectively silences dissent within the movement, transforming "America First" into an ideology that demands loyalty to specific figures rather than fixed anti-war principles. [Automatically generated summary]
Donald Trump has finally given a very clear and concrete definition of MAGA, Make America First, Make America Great Again, the title that he has used to describe his political movement essentially from the very start since 2015 when he announced his run for president.
But he did so in the most petty and disturbing way possible.
There has been a kind of war of words waged among various popular conservative influencers and pundits, including people who are critical of Israel on the one hand, like Tucker Carlson and increasingly Megan Kelly, and then the sort of hardcore neocons who have long dominated the Republican Party, the type that Trump had repeatedly vowed to vanquish, people like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin.
And it really came to a head over the past week with the war in Iran as it became an increasingly nasty and vitriolic war of words between Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly on the one hand and Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro in particular on the other.
And it got very personal when Megan Kelly began after months of enduring the most vicious attacks from Mark Levin, having him call her a Jew hater and an anti-Semite and a Nazi over and over for the crime of criticizing Israel.
And I don't even mean harshly criticizing Israel.
Megan has been largely a defender of Israel for much of her career, was a critic of the student movement that broke out and erupted after the October 7th attack on American college campuses.
I debated Megan on that question and she was on the side of deporting those anti-Israel pro-Palestinian students.
And I, of course, was opposed to their deportation and defended their rights.
But it's been a trajectory, an evolution on the part of Megan.
Like there has been a lot of conservative, on the part of conservative influencers and journalists and activists, including Charlie Kirk before he died.
And the neocons in the party, led by people like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin and Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, are apoplectic and absolutely determined to destroy any possibility that there can be any space in the Republican Party or in the conservative movement or in the MAGA movement for criticizing Israel because Israel is and always has been the most important issue to them by far, far more important than any issues involving Americans or the United States.
President Trump is the commander in chief of the armed forces currently engaged in a very dangerous regional war that he started along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is a war in which tens of thousands of American troops, kids of other families, not Donald Trump's families, but kids of other people's families, American families, are in harm's way because he sent them there.
He deployed them to that region for a war that he fought.
And they're dying and being severely wounded in the war that he is responsible for.
And yet in the midst of his responsibility to be their commander in chief to prosecute this war that has not gone anywhere anything like what he told us it would, what people predicted it would, he has found time not only to do things like take calls from Laura Loomer, including on the very first night of the war when four American soldiers were killed, President Trump found time to take a phone call from someone as unhinged and deranged and Israel devoted as Laura Loomer,
where she heralded him as a courageous world historic war hero.
But he has now found time to intervene in this pundit war, in this bickering between mostly former Fox News hosts that are taking that's taking place online.
Apparently, he has nothing better to do than decide to intervene in this war.
And he did so by issuing a defense of Mark Levin.
As supreme and classic of a neocon as it gets, you cannot find a more extreme example, a worse illustration of the kind of warmongering, sociopathic, Israel loyal chicken hawk than Mark Levin, the exact kind of person that Donald Trump said needed to be purged from the Republican Party and from his movement.
And yet he has declared people like Megan Kelly and Tucker Carlson, along with Thomas Massey and Marjorie Teller Greene and anyone else who has criticized Israel, declared them persona non grata, expelled them from the MAGA movement.
And he issued this derange, lengthy, extremely excitable and passionate decree in defense of Mark Levin last night while he's prosecuting a war in which American soldiers that he sent there are dying or being severely permanently wounded.
I think it's worth really listening to what he said because in the process of what he said in defense of Mark Levin, he defined his understanding of what it means to be MAGA.
Either you adhere to these rules and believe in these things and observe these decrees, and then you can be in MA, but if you don't, you're out of MAGA.
And this is Donald Trump's definition of what that means.
Here's what he said: quote, Mark Levin, a truly great American patriot, is somewhat under siege by other people with far less intellect, capability, and love of our country.
Mark is tough, strong, and brilliant, hence the nickname, the great one, conceived by our MAGA friend, the wonderful Sean Hannity.
After years of dealing with Mark in legal media and other capacities, Mark would often do Sean's show speaking as a lawyer, and Sean realized then, as did others, that Mark was special.
Mark Levin was not looking to do television, radio, or anything else, but he was drafted by very smart people who understood that there are a few like him.
He is a true conservative and intellect, far smarter than those who criticize him.
Above all, he is a man of great wisdom and common sense who truly loves our country.
By our country, I'm not sure if he means Israel or the United States, but that's what Trump wrote.
He goes on, quote, when you hear others unfairly attack Mark, remember that they are jealous and angry human beings whose quote sway is much less than the public understands and will, now that they know where I stand, rapidly diminish.
Other than for his wonderful wife and family, Mark Levin only cares and wants one thing, greatness and success for Israel.
No, no, for America.
Those that speak ill of Mark will quickly fall by the wayside as they do, as do the people whose ideas, policies, and footings are not sound.
They are not MAGA.
If you criticize Mark Levin, you are not MAGA.
I am MAGA.
And MAGA includes not allowing Iran, a sick, demented, and violent terrorist regime, to have a nuclear weapon to abomin the United States of America, the Middle East, and ultimately the rest of the world.
MAGA is about stopping them cold.
And that is exactly what we have been doing.
God bless our great military, which I have rebuilt since the beginning of my first term to achieve everlasting peace through strain.
Make America great again.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
President Donald J. Trump.
So I want to delve into the substance of that.
And there is substance there, despite how deranged of a rant that is.
It's kind of like a mad king just wandering the halls of power alone, ranting and raving in the middle of a war under siege.
But there is substance there, but I do have to say that I'm not somebody who starts invoking melodramatic language about the commander in chief and the gravity of war and the need to engage in this kind of compartment.
But the fact is that Donald Trump did start a war of choice.
There's no question it was a war of choice.
Iran was not attacking the United States, not about to attack the United States, except because Israel was about to attack Iran.
So we had to attack Iran, supposedly, because Israel was going to.
So it was for Israel.
That was Mark Rubio's unintentionally candid explanation.
But Iran was not about to attack the United States.
It was a war of choice.
And this war of choice was effectuated by Donald Trump sending the sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers of huge numbers of American families, but of course never his own to a very dangerous war where American troops have been killed, have been severely wounded in fairly large numbers.
And in the midst of this war, it's not like it's eight months long.
It's only about 12 days old.
He found the time to write this genuinely lengthy.
impassioned screed about a Fox News weekend host and to define MAGA as being a movement that must defend and cheer for and agree with Mark Levin.
And that anyone who doesn't agree with Mark Levin, especially on the question of Israel and Iran, is somebody who has to be expelled from MAGA, which in this case means people like Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly.
And of course, Mark Levin is a longtime never Trumper like Ben Shapiro and like so many of these Israel fanatics around whom this MAGA movement is now built.
It has really become a presidency in the second term of people like Ben Shapiro and Benjamin Netanyahu and Palantir and Lindsey Graham and Mark Levin and the large corporatist powers that he promised to combat in defense of the ordinary working men and women.
Remember all of that?
All of that is gone.
This is whose presidency the second Trump term has become.
Now, this is not the first time that Trump has said things of this nature.
And by the way, I just want to say, before I even get to the whole rest of the part about the substance of it, I do want to say that, again, I'm not somebody who, in general, makes a big deal out of how a president has to comport.
I've never been that bothered by President Trump's aboriginal comportment for what we expect of a president.
But things like this, I do find genuinely disturbing and dangerous.
This is from the Financial Times on March 3rd, which reported this, quote, hours after President Trump launched his attack on Iran, not weeks, not days, but hours after he launched his attack on Iran, Trump called one of his favorite influencers, the far-right activist, Laura Loomer, to bask in her praise.
Quote, I said it's a great job and people all around the world are cheering you on, Laura Loomer told the Financial Times, he's making us proud to be American.
A self-described Islamophobe, Loomer is one of a chorus of ultra-hawkish politicians, commentators, and social media personalities who have lent their support to Trump's assault, one of the most ambitious interventions the U.S. has attempted in the media.
So she didn't even call him.
He called war a loomer.
This is in the first 24 hours of the war when it ended up seven Americans were killed in that first 24 hours and dozens of others seriously wounded.
And he's telling his whoever, get Laura Loomer on the phone.
This is not responsible behavior for somebody who just started a serious war and sent others to risk their lives and die in it.
But I think what's really going on here is that Trump has redefined MAGA away from being a certain set of political principles that he had focused his three campaigns on, especially involving foreign policy and the need to end wars in the Middle East, all of which, as we've extensively documented, have been violently betrayed and reversed.
And he has explicitly turned it into a cult of personality.
He has repeatedly said now, MAGA means one thing and one thing only.
He said it in that tweet as well.
He said, MAGA means me, Donald Trump.
Whatever I believe, that's what MAGA.
So if I woke up yesterday, I said X, MAGA is X.
But if I wake up today and say not X, MAGA is not X. MAGA is not a movement that can exist separately from whatever beliefs or thoughts I have at any given moment.
MAGA is me.
MAGA is a cult of personality, which I lead.
And if you want to be a MAGA, it means you cannot, by definition, disagree with me.
If you disagree with me, like Carlson has, like Megan Kelly has, by definition, you can no longer be a MAGA because you're disagreeing with me.
Here is Trump.
Was uh last week when Tucker Carlson was expressing concerns about the war in Iran.
Trump called Jonathan Jonathan Carl, a television journalist with ABC News, part of the mainstream media Trump claims to hate and yet is increasingly turning to to get out his message.
And Jonathan Carl tweeted a summary of that conversation, which went as follows: In a lengthy conversation just now, President Trump hit back at Tucker Carlson, who called the Iran war, quote, absolutely disgusting and evil, end quote.
Quote, Trump Tucker has lost his way, Trump told me.
I knew that a long time ago, and he's not MAGA.
MAGA is saving our country.
MAGA is making our country great again.
MAGA is America first, and Tucker is none of those things.
And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.
So MAGA now is Mark Levin and Lindsey Graham and Ben Shapiro and Benjamin Netanyahu, but MAGA is not Tucker Carlson or Thomas Massey or Marjorie Teller Green or Megan Kelly or anyone who questions wars in the Middle East or on behalf of Israel.
Here is similar cult-like behavior from Donald Trump defining his own movement as a cult.
It's not my interpretation of Trump's definition.
It's Trump's definition that he's increasingly promulgating from the Hill.
Trump knocks Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly over criticism over the Iran war.
MAGA is Trump.
MAGA is Trump.
MAGA is not a set of ideas.
MAGA is not about populism.
It is not about the ordinary man and woman.
It's not about anti-globalism.
It's not about anti-war.
It's not about putting America first.
MAGA is Donald Trump and whatever happened that he believes at any given moment that he wakes up.
Last year, when Tucker was questioning the bombing of Iran along with Israel, Trump said the same thing.
He went to the Atlantic and spoke to the former Washington Post reporter Michael Scher, who now works at the Atlantic, and it produced this headline: Trump says he decides what America first means.
The president told me he was optimistic about ending foreign wars.
Then he ended our conversation to take a call from Vladimir Putin.
And the beginning of the article said this: quote, when I caught Donald Trump by phone this morning, the president wanted to make one thing clear: America first means whatever he says it does.
Quote, well, considering that I'm the one that developed America first, and considering that the term wasn't used until I came along, I think I'm the one that decides that, Trump told me.
And then he went on to defend his views on Iran as we were leading up to the bombing of Iran.
Back in December, when Trump declared both Thomas Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene out of the MAGA movement, and Trump spent this weekend in Kentucky campaigning to remove Thomas Massey, one of the very few members of the Republican Party who questions Israel and U.S. support and financing of it, he already drove Marjorie Taylor Greene out of Congress by calling her Marjorie Trader Green.
You can imagine what she endured as a result of having Donald Trump call her a traitor.
And she's now out of Congress and he declared out of the MAGA movement.
Marjorie Taylor Green, and he's now trying to do the same with Thomas Massey.
And you see who's funding the campaign against Thomas Massey.
It's not grassroots Trump supporters.
It's Miriam Adelson and other Israeli billionaires like her or Israel-obsessed billionaires like her whose cause is Israel.
That's who's pouring money on at Trump's behest into removing Thomas Massey from Congress because he's one of the very few people who questions Israel.
So you see this, there's this long list of people who were once very popular among MAGA: Tucker Carlson, Ming Kelly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massey.
And they have all now been expelled, exiled by the king, the king of MAGA, not for any ideological offense, but for criticizing or questioning his policy.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene made the distinction that Donald Trump is right.
Expelled Neocons and Warmongers00:07:51
MAGA is a cult of personality.
MAGA means nothing more than I agree with whatever Donald Trump says to believe on any given day.
During 2024, Trump was criticizing Biden for bombing Yemen.
MAGA meant you opposed the bombing of Yemen.
Trump's elected within a month, not even of him being inaugurated.
He resumes and escalates Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen that he had just criticized a few months ago.
Now, MAGA means you're in favor of bombing him.
If Trump tomorrow ends the war in Iran, MAGA means you cheer.
If Trump refuses to end the war in Iran for another three months, MAGA means that you cheer that.
And she was drawing the distinction between MAGA, which is a cult of personality, and America First, which is a set of principles and beliefs that are fixed, that sometimes Donald Trump can adhere to and sometimes he can violate.
And that people of conscience and integrity who don't want to be in a cult will praise Trump when he adheres to them and criticize them when he violates them.
And I do think that's the relevant distinction here.
Now, let's just note that while Donald Trump is arbitrating these vituperative and even substantive, but still relatively petty fights between online conservative personalities, this is what's happening to the war that he started.
One of the many things that's happened.
From the Washington Post, this is from an hour ago or so.
The number of U.S. troops wounded in Iran war surpasses 200, 200 American troops now wounded across seven countries.
The injuries have occurred as Iran launches waves of missiles and one-way attack drones in response to the Trump administration's explosive assaults.
Imagine being a family member, a parent of one of the troops that are killed in this war or severely wounded in this war, and Trump is on social media arbitrating a fight between Megan Kelly and Mark Levin and saying how you have to be on Mark Levin's side in order to be in MAGA or taking calls from Laurel Loomer.
Wouldn't you be rather angry about that?
Now, the subtitle part is that it is hard to overstate how pure of an example of warmongering sociopath neocon Mark Levin is.
You can't really find anybody who fits the bill more than he.
And I just want to remind you what Donald Trump said about those kind of people right before the 2024 election, just to show you what a complete fraud Trump has become.
Trump was on stage, ironically, with Tucker Carlson, who's now out of MAGA.
But a few days before the 2024 election, Trump needed them.
So he was on stage with Tucker.
And Tucker asked him about Liz Cheney campaigning with Kamala Harris and Dick Cheney endorsing Kamala Harris.
And Trump launched into a contemptuous assault on warmongers in Washington who love to send others to war, but who never fight themselves.
And I defended Trump on two grounds.
One was that CNN tried to turn this into some sort of threat that they claimed Trump was making against Liz Cheney to put her in front of a firing squad, one of the most egregious distortions of fake news I've seen in the campaign.
But the other part of it was Trump's critique of warmongers in Washington as exemplified by Liz Cheney was absolutely correct.
Listen to what he said about Liz Cheney, and I defy any of you to tell me how it does not apply with at least equal force to the person that Donald Trump now says is the epitome of MAGA, Mark Levin.
I didn't speak to him about it, but then, you know, go a couple of years forward ago now.
And I don't blame him for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb.
She's a radical war hawk.
Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her.
Okay, let's see how she feels about it.
You know, when the guns are trained on her face.
You know, they're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, oh, gee, Will, let's send, let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.
But she's a stupid person.
And I used to have, I'd have meetings with a lot of people.
And she always wanted to go to war with people.
So whether it's her, whether it's sick, I was surprised a little bit with Dick Cheney.
I didn't know him at all.
All right, now he goes into some rambling story about Dick Cheney and what he ever did for a Scruter W, but that's what Trump was saying.
We hate people like Liz Cheney, these warmongers who want to send people to war constantly that they don't fight it.
And he said it to Tucker Carlson, who agreed with him.
Tucker's now out because he questions the war in Iran.
And Mark Levin is now the face of MAGA.
Why not make Liz Cheney the face of MAGA?
Here are a few other instances in which Trump talked about his hatred of neocons and warmongers like Mark Levin.
he was talking at the 2023 CPAC conference.
We started this journey, a journey like there has never been before.
There's never been anything like this.
We had a Republican Party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots, and fools.
But we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush.
Oh, thank God we're never going to once again have a Republican Party ruled by neocon freaks like Mark Levin.
Jeb Bush, by the way, was one of the people he listed who is a ardent fan of this war in Iran and has publicly praised Trump for good reason since Trump is embracing the Mark Levin, Bush-Cheney ideology of wars in the Middle East.
is another part of that speech that he gave at CPAC.
With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state.
We will expel the warmongers.
They are people that don't get it, although in some cases they get it.
They get it for their wallets.
But we can't do that.
We can't let that happen.
We can't let that happen.
We started this journey.
No more Mark Levins.
Here's one last speech Trump gave where he talked about his plans for peace and the like, preventing World War III.
We have never been closer to World War III than we are today under Joe Biden.
A global conflict between nuclear armed powers would mean death and destruction on a scale unmatched in human history.
It would be nuclear Armageddon.
Nothing is more important than avoiding that nightmare.
We will avoid it, but we need new leadership.
Every day this proxy battle in Ukraine went on talking about the proxy battle in Ukraine, but then this is what he said was at fault.
It must be absolutely clear that our objective is to immediately have a total cession of hostilities.
All shooting has to stop.
This is the central issue.
We need peace without delay.
In addition, there must also be a complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist neocon establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad, while they turn us into a third world country and a third world dictatorship right here at home.
The State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all of the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the deep staters and put America first.
We have to put America first.
The central goal is to dismantle the machinery of warmongering neocons that are bankrupting our country, fighting wars for other countries, and putting our security and interests instead of America first.
That was Trump's central pledge for a decade.
And now he wants you to understand that if you criticize Mark Levin or Ben Shapiro or Benjamin Etanyahu, by definition, you are out of MAGA because MA understands that the neoconservative warmongering of Mark Levin is the guiding ideology of Donald Trump's political movement.
The Fraudulent Great One00:00:21
I'm sure if you go back far enough in history, you can find political movements and political leaders more fraudulent than Donald Trump and the campaign that he ran that brought him to the White House this time.
But if you can, it will be an extremely difficult endeavor and you certainly won't find many.
And just remember, if you want to stay in MAGA, do not even think about criticizing the great One, Mark LeBin.